Consciousness: and brain damage (General)

dhw: If you are happy with Adler’s 50/50 chance that your God listens to us and answers our prayers, why can’t you be happy with a 50/50 chance that your God has enjoyed life’s ever changing spectacle for its own sake, and not just for the sake of producing Homo sapiens (for reasons you “cannot” consider for fear of humanizing him).

DAVID: I won't accept your 50/50 humanizing on principle that we cannot know. Adler's opinion is his considered judgment which I follow.

dhw: If your guiding principle is that we cannot “know”, then none of your beliefs should be acceptable to you. All of them, like Adler’s, are opinions and no doubt considered judgements, but they are not knowledge. The same applies to your insistence that God must have dabbled or preprogrammed every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in order to provide energy to keep life going until he could produce the brain of Homo sapiens. You cannot “know” this. It is an opinion, a considered judgement. Your unwillingness to consider a different divine motive and ‘modus operandi’ for evolution therefore has nothing to do with the principle that we cannot “know”. I will leave you to ask yourself what other possible reason you might have for refusing to consider alternatives.

I will resist any attempt to analyze a humanized God. I won't even try, as you keep doing. We cannot know as you point out. Why try? All my other opinions that you list above are based on reasoned thought as you stated. Your view of God differs from mine.